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Yes, then it that case, you would want to use a canonical tag indicating which page Google should focus on. If the page is defunct or not used anymore, then do as Irving suggests and 301 it.  Good luck.

I thought you were saying you used that keyword to much. If you think your using it the right amount with the link there, by all means use it.

It's really tough for us to tell what those parameters do, so you have to be careful. Just because a URL has certain parameters doesn't mean it's a duplicate. If these really are duplicate or near duplicate pages, you've got a few options: (1) Consolidate them with rel-canonical (2) Block them with META NOINDEX (Meta Robots) (3) Block/ignore the parameters in Google Webmaster Tools It's a complex subject, and I have a mega-post about it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/duplicate-content-in-a-post-panda-world I'm not a Magento expert, though - Joost de Valk has some resources worth checking out: http://yoast.com/articles/magento-seo/

This probably isn't the answer you're looking for, but my response is that if a directory is relevant, industry-specific, reliable, etc, it's probably worth completing a profile there. On the other hand, if it's a general biz directory, looks like it exists for the purpose of SEO, doesn't appear highly for relevant searches, etc, it's probably not worth the time. Grouping sites under the umbrella of "directory" it's pretty vague. After all, http://house.gov/ is just a directory. But it probably isn't what you think of as a directory when you think of internet directories. Will submitting to directories hurt you? In most cases I would say probably not. Unless you're hitting the real bottom of the barrel. It's more of a matter of resource allocation. Hope this helps.

I think this is an answer that goes beyond Google.  We use rewrites extensively and do not have any problems.  There are some caveats Regarding GoogleBot missing information, you just need to make sure that the new URL has all the info. Lets say you are a plumbing portal and use /locator/find?radius=60&zip=&state=FL rewrite to /plumbers/florida-fl/miami/33110/ Your search radius can be a default value vs having to put it in as a parameter. It helps with site structure to think of things as how they would be as a static directory.  In this case, you are actually giving more information to GoogleBot with the rewritten URL vs the old one as you have included who you are searching for (a plumber) the city (miami), state (fl) and zip code (33110).  The previous URL only indicated the state.  If you dont like using all the folders, you can simply have a longer file name with dashes in between the words. If you use rewrites, make sure Google is not spidering the original URLs otherwise you get penalized for duplicate errors.  Monitoring Webmaster Tools or using spider software will help you find the holes.  You can then use things like Canonical Links and Noindex Tags to get the old URLs out of the index and make sure Google has the correct pages.    This all depends on how you implement your rewrites. If you take some time to look at how you want to organized your site to start with then the first two items will take care of themselves usually.  A good exercise is to write down how all of this would work within a breadcrumb navigation.  This forces you to get organized and also helps you setup how you want all your pages to be shown to Google.   If you do start to add parameters on top of this basic structure like pagination or other sortable options, you need to think how you would noindex, follow those pages to make sure that your main page would rank for a given key phrase vs all the other sorted versions of the same page. One thing that is overlooked in setting up this kind of structure is that you can use it to your advantage in your analytic tools to look at global trends to your site.  This could be in any site.  Using the example above, all US states are at the 2nd level directory, cities are 3rd and zip is 4th.  Makes it really super easy to use a regexp on urls to group them.  For example, you could setup a filter in you analytics to easily combine all sessions that looked at pages in Florida and wanted to see what the next action was. Cheers!

Hi Guy, Does this help... Although the canonical URL tag is generally thought of as a way to solve duplicate content problems, it can be extremely wise to use it on every (unique) page of a site to help prevent any query strings, session IDs, scraped versions, licensing deals or future developments to potentially create a secondary version and pull link juice or other metrics away from the original. We believe the canonical URL tag is a best practice to help prevent future problems, even if nothing is specifically duplicate/problematic today. Source:http://pro.seomoz.org/tools/on-page-keyword-optimization/new

There was no effect on the rankings, no significant ups or downs.  But now when I do the site:www.domain.com command in Google, I see just the pages that I want Google to index. It can only help in the long run I guess.

Copycsape.com is a good place to see how much your content is duplicated with others… If I would be at your place I might never have considered duplicate content as a problem because of the following facts: I am the original source of the content Google is smart it can guess who the real content creator is and give all credits to original content instead of content scrapers… Mostly this happens with blog, infect SEOmoz blog’s content has been copied on multiple places but I a haven’t noticed any penalty on SEOmoz nor I see scrapers ranking above the original content.

302 redirects really should only be used if it's a temporary redirection. That's what it's for. If that form is NOT going to be changed to the non http version in the near future, there's no legitimate reason to leave the 302.  With a 302 you lose any long-term value opportunity with the page the 302 points to. Now the other issue is - do you want that form indexed? If not, it should be blocked from indexing. Also, once someone goes into https status on that form, what happens when they go somewhere else on the site? Does it redlrect back to non https status? And if so, have you ensured that's true on every link out to other pages on the site from that form? Too many times I've seen that failed to be implemented.